Well, reading between the tea leaves here listening to the Patrick Fitzgerald Press Conference today the following
significant points were made:
- The Grand Jury has completed the bulk of it's work.
- The continuation of a 2nd Grand Jury is simply a formality (because the 1st Grand Jury cannot legally be extended) but again bulk of the actual work in this case, according to Fitzgerald is already completed.
- There are no expectations of any further indictments ( i.e., Rove, Cheney, Bolton, Hadley, Rice, Bush, etc. ) and no significant new work from here on..
- There will be no effort here to prosecute the "Mr. X" in the Vice-President's office for being the actual source of providing Plame's background to Lewis Libby.
- Fitzgerald seeks to wrap up the entire leak case as quickly as he can merely as a leak case (and nothing further) and is not interested in exploring any of the important underlying wider issues that we here have all been talking about, such as: a) who forged the Niger Uranium report, b) the fraudulent selling of the "Iraq Nuclear Threat" and Iraq War, c) the constitutional conduct of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and their own perjury.
- Fitzgerald made clear that he has no interest whatsoever (unlike Ken Starr) in expanding his own authority or his own role or probing/confronting the closely related matters in this case that might involve additional criminality.
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Some may not interpret his Press Conference quite this way but I found it very, very, very revealing that Fitzgerald basically said that the bulk of the Grand Jury work is done and implied in essence that there is no further work to do (aside from trial prep & wrap-up) and no further targets.
I also found it very revealing that the Isocoft (Newsweek) reporter asked a very profound question about why "Mr X", the original source to Libby, is not also facing an indictment and Fitzgerald essentially said that nobody other than Libby is relevant to any Indictment charges.
Needless to say, what could have been a big, big, Bush Administration Watergate senario has simply fizzled-out here into nothing but 1 single Indictment and 1 single resignation.
Rove walks (and is free to reek havoc in the 2006 elections)
Cheney walks (and is free to wage War in Syria or Iran )
Bolton walks (and is free to destroy the United Nations)
Bush walks (and is free to look guilt-free )
etc.
What could have brought down the Bush administration and also made clear even to partisans the widespread lies, deceit, fraud, revenge-against-whistleblowers, and high criminal abuse of office that created this totally unnecessary Iraq horror, human catastrophe, & madness has now melted away into a relative "non-story" here about 1 single obscure individual that 99% of the American do not even
know and do not care about at all one way or another.
We need to get back to focusing on:
- The DowningStreet Memos
- Massive Civil Disobedience
- Katrina Incompetence
- Verified Voting
This investigation is now nothing more but a tiny blip on the radar screen.